


The Song at the End of the World

by gazeteur



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo, The Language of Thorns - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Mythology References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-02-08 19:04:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12871041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gazeteur/pseuds/gazeteur
Summary: Aleksander Morozova—in this lifetime, he has tired of fabricated names, lucent saints and forgotten wars—stumbles upon her simply because he has stolen away to somewhere he is not supposed to be.——Cold War-ish AU, with Slavic mythology undertones.





	1. Bargains

**Author's Note:**

> Light spoilers for The Language of Thorns, specifically the story When Water Sang Fire. I would really recommend reading TLoT before reading this!

The research outpost resides in the Russian settlement of Egvekinot, along the coastal edge of Anadyr Bay. A feat of metal and stone, the structure crowns the Bering Sea—gracing the northernmost tip of the bay like an unpolished, pitted jewel set into the arc of a weathered _kokoshnik_.  
****

What they do not mention on paper, or on official government documents, is this unspoken agreement bartered by its leader: a safe haven for Grisha on the Eastern frontier of Russia, under the guise of a top-secret, Grisha-run research institute.

 

* * *

 

The doors were not locked.

At least, Aleksander does not see them as such, sharpening the skeins of darkness gathered loosely between his fingers into a serviceable pick.

The grind of heavy metal, and he emerges in an icy room. Breath leaves his lips in silver-white puffs, as he stands in a cavernous space that is also half-water—an imminent flood blocked off by a foot of glass. A stark, green light falls on everything: striking the bare concrete floor, his pale skin, and into the murky waters of the floor-to-ceiling water tank.

He almost writes off the tank as empty, if not for the pluck of power that sings like a song in his veins—a trail he has followed down, down into the deepest bowels of the stronghold.

The first thing to sieve out of the haze is a silver tail, swishing like the lash of a whip through the edgeless water. Tendrils of black hair, like spilt ink, then emerge; they linger around the figure’s face, framing her piercing gaze. 

“Sidroher,” Aleksander says, finding the word rusty and disused on his tongue.

He has heard of them, the sidroher: magical beings not unlike selkies or mermaids, that once depended on their music to conjure up storms to defend their waters. Much of their song, and in turn their magic, is lost to time now. Except for this one.

“Finally, a face,” says the sidroher, raising a single hand in neither beckoning nor greeting. “Tell me, Darkling, will you not say my true name?”

She is not what he expects when she speaks, with syllables that fall like the discordant whisper of glass shards brushing against each other. His gaze is yanked to the high collar of Grisha steel strangling her neck. The metal emits a green glow, humming with magic-quelling enchantments—a familiar handiwork.

A few strides close the distance between them, until he is right in front of the glass. “Sidroher, I have no use for names now, this is a fact that should not escape your notice.”

“But you have heard the stories.”

He has. A vision—not steel but of bone—flickers, uninvited, in his mind. He wills it away; but it must show on his face as some sort of hesitance, because of the abrupt manner she turns, fire in her eyes.

“Many tales have been written about me by the survivors, by the coy and the cunning, who realised that they were less so in the face of a pivotal bargain,” she declares. “What they wanted… it is all so easy to divine. But has anyone put forth such a question before me?” Her hand grasps at a pearl attached to a necklace below her collar, rolling it mindlessly between her fingers.

Slowly he lifts a hand, the back of it trailing against the glass. The room is dim enough for him to glimpse his reflection in it.

The glass mists from his breath. “Tell me, Sea Witch, what is it that you want?”

She does not answer; her turned back implores him to leave.

 

* * *

 

“So you have met her,” are his mother’s first words to him when he steps into her office, pushing the papers that have spilt onto the chair aside and taking a seat opposite her.

Aleksander nods, barely, in answer. Instead of speaking, his gaze flicks to the growing pile of missives on her desk, stamped and emblazoned _CONFIDENTIAL_ , typewritten words trailing upon letterheads from different governmental branches.

“I will give you my answer, boy, to the question you are now delaying to ask.” The paper she is studying in her hand drops. “She has terrorised the seas long enough. We do not need destruction this close to our shores, drawing the ire of nations who want nothing to do with us, and even of those who do.”

His gaze does not lift from the desk, from the sudden correspondence flooding its surface. “You mean to use her as a bargaining chip,” he intones tersely.

“I mean to buy us time.”

“There is another way.” _I will devise one._ He does not say the second part out loud, because he has learned too well, too many times.

His mother knows what he has done, and what he will do. So she makes a throwaway wave of her hand, but there is steel behind her eyes. “Do as you wish, boy, but remember this: war is a bloodthirsty hound that neither rests nor tires. Give it time, and it will pursue you to the very edges of the world.”

 

* * *

 

Aleksander returns days later, to the cold, cold room that sits the bottom of an endless flight of stairs, this time cradling a bundle of cloth in his hands. As he climbs the ladder leading to the top of the tank, he can feel the sidroher’s eyes on him—and the constant flash of silver from her moving tail.

At the top of the tank lies a platform that overhangs the opening. As he kneels on this lattice of steel, Aleksander tastes the knife’s edge between certainty and ruin on his tongue. “I wish to make a bargain with you, Ulla,” he begins.

“A bargain,” Ulla, the sidroher, repeats, savouring the word while her tail flicks in interest.

He unwinds the silk, stiff with salt spray, to reveal a sykurn knife nestled in its folds. “I will set you free, in return for your magic to do what no one else has accomplished.”

Ulla rests her arms against the metal lattice. “Not even you…?” she asks, tapering her question with his titles, old ones, that he allows to roll off his shoulders like meaningless rivulets.

His lips twist. “No, not even me.”

When Aleksander has finished speaking of his plan, or thinks he has, he falters. Up close, the similarities between them unsheathe themselves. It is like peering into a mirror—the same black hair, the same eyes, and that familiar thread of power.

“There is a place for you in this,” he says finally, grappling with some unknown want.

Ulla trains a long, steady look at him—like the look of an old wound—before all emotion sinks out of reach in her eyes.

“Very well,” she declares imperiously, like a practised line, despite the strained quality of her voice. “You know what my cooperation will require, and I do not think it is something that can be relinquished so easily.”

Without fanfare she rises up to spill the words in his ear.

 

* * *

 

He has a day to bring her what she asked for.

The third time he ventures into the room he is dressed in a black _kefta,_ with another—this one dark blue—draped on one arm. Dark circles cut grooves under his eyes.

But his mannerisms do not betray him: not when he hands her the sykurn knife, still wrapped in fabric; and not when he saws away the collar from her neck with a knife honed from Grisha steel. A slight wave of his hand, and conjured darkness gathers to snuff out the glow of the enchantment.

When he moves to stand Aleksander feels a pull on his arm, strong enough for rippling water to fill the entirety of his vision. A rash thought dashes across his mind, like blood against snow. The irony of a watery death does not escape him, after having burned on a pyre so many lifetimes ago.

But Ulla only pulls him close enough to whisper in his ear—“Stand back.”— before releasing him. Then she plunges straight down into the water like a dropped dagger, surface undisturbed except for the barest swirls of foam.

Standing in the middle of the room, his gaze is trained on his boots; all he hears is the thunderous sound of glass breaking that booms in his ears— And then nothing; the flood he expects does not come.

It is silent, except for the susurration of water lapping at his feet, and a soft hum—a note resonating like the continuous strike of a bell.

He doesn’t look up until the watery footsteps near, until human toes inch into his view—until the _kefta_ slides off his arm. When he does, Ulla has already brushed past him. Instead, a wall of water, shimmering and contained, greets him. It is not held back by glass, but by the singular note she is humming—barely a song.

_This is power,_ his mind reminds him, over and over again, just when he has willed himself to forget.

 

* * *

 

 

They leave in the early dawn, taking a ship along the coast eastward, until their course splays from the safety of land—dropping anchor in the middle of the dark sea.

Two figures swathed in blue—a Squaller-Tidemaker pair—take up positions at the stern, arms raised, dampening the waves to stabilise the ship the best they can. An Inferni coaxes a flame into lamps fabricated by a Durast, illuminating the seas around them: ceaseless waves upon waves. There are others as well; they had brought along whomever Aleksander could convince to make this journey—a cross between a fool’s errand and an idealist’s bargain.

As the wind whips his hair into disarray, Aleksander places a hand on the railing and casts his eyes outwards— darkened skies roiling above a tumultuous slate-grey sea. He remembers his mother’s words, uttered what seemed like days ago, and his own—silently written in his heart so very long ago that can no longer feel the outline of the scar. The very edges of the world, she had said. What other edge is there, but this one that separates one world from the next?

The hand on his tears him from the sea, if only briefly.

“It is a song I have worked for centuries,” Ulla says quietly, following his gaze outwards. She must know what he is thinking, because her waterlike eyes flick to him for a second, hesitant to say her next words. “Be ready when I give the sign.”

Ulla begins with a song of storm magic, letting the notes climb in tandem with the one already brewing around them. Then, the roil of the sea begins to take on a different tone—a pattern too precise to be anything but a sidroher’s doing.

The sign: a squeeze of a hand—

He barely has time to channel the darkness before a sudden pull commands his entire attention, over a task he has so easily accomplished in the past without much thought. At the mercy of another greater power, the darkness rips from him, hollowing him from the inside out with the finality of something that will not return.

A crack resounds, accompanied by a light so bright that for a moment it seems like day, the sky touched by a pure brilliance that exists only at the height of noon. Gradually the waves halt, and begin to part around what has been unearthed—sand, a speck at first before a cluster, rising above the foam-streaked waves that becomes what is unmistakable for dry land.


	2. Myths

This is how the tale goes, as it has been told for millennia:

In the beginning there was only darkness: a dark sky and a dark sea.  
True magic existed then, a power calling from the depths of the ocean a handful of sand thatbecame land—what they call New Ravka.  
Darkness and sea merged to ring this new land, hiding it from prying eyes and pursuit.  
This land was where the first Grisha found themselves, after sailing several days at sea.  
The moment the ship they rode upon nudged its coast, the vessel was torn down and rebuilt.  
The Grisha bestowed upon this skiff—enchanted to cut through seas like it is darkness and sail through darkness as if it were a sea—with their gifts:

A Durast fortified its hull with Grisha steel.  
An Alkemi graced its broadside with artillery that would never miss their mark.  
An Inferni bestowed an everlasting flame to guide the ship’s way, caging it in a lantern.  
A Squaller filled its sails with favourable winds.  
A Tidemaker enchanted its hull to withstand the strongest of waves.

Of course, you wish to know what became of them beyond the tale, so I will say it here:

In this new land ruled by darkness and the sea,  
The darkling: a part of him lies with this new world he has built, and he finds his wants do not stray beyond its boundaries, not yet.  
The witch keeps her knife close, still. After all, it takes more than a new world to tame a wild heart.

Now you know the story, the plans upon which this new world was built.

You ask, but who is to answer what made the darkness and the sea draw new land up from the depths of the earth? That is between them, in the words they share alone, inside the room with the tank furrowed deep in some forgotten stronghold fringing an unforgiving sea.

Perhaps if you strain your ears, you can hear echoes of their conversation still—in the rhythmic lap of water against the hull of the vessel you reside upon, as it cuts through the Bering Sea.

If you stray from your course, towards the north of Diomede Islands, to where a line purports to cleave the world in two, perhaps your ship will edge upon land several miles premature. Perhaps you will be delivered by the sea to figures standing on the shore, dressed in odd cloaks and speaking in stranger tongues, syllables resonating with a cold familiarity.

The key to this story is that they will spare you. Perhaps to warn others, to tell the tale, or to strike a flint against the wandering imagination.

But not many will believe you. The few who do, return. Whether they make the journey is a matter of eventuality rather than certainty: the same way snowmelt from the peak will always find its way back to the sea.


End file.
